Major industrial facilities including Posco’s steel mill and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power’s nuclear plants operated as normal, despite a 4.6 magnitutde earthquake in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, the companies said Sunday.

Posco’s steel mill in Pohang is running without abnormal signs, the steelmaker said.

The southeastern city, home to the country’s largest steelmaker, was hit by a 4.6 magnitude quake at 5:03 a.m., 5 kilometers northwest of the city’s northern district at a depth of 9 kilometers.

It was the second strongest quake in the region, following a 5.4 magnitutde quake in November.

Posco has a steel mill complex capable of producing 9.1 million tons of steel products in the southern part of Pohang. 

Although the earthquake was felt at Hanbit Nuclear Plant 274 kilometers away from the seismic center in Yeonggwang, South Jeolla Province, the KHNP said the plant and others maintained operations as normal.

The quake was measured 0.0052g at the Hanbit plant.

Korean nuclear plants are designed to manually stop operations when the seismic value is higher than 0.1g, and to be automatically halted at over 0.18g.

Semiconductor facilities run by Samsung Electronics in Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek in Gyeonggi Province were also operating as usual, the company said. SK hynix’s plant in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, was running without any reports of problems, the chipmaker said.

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)